The Infinite Machine

In Ethereum, there are two types of accounts: externally owned accounts, controlled by people’s private keys and containing no code, and contract accounts, controlled by their code.

Ethereans learned that they can program computers, but they can’t program humans, whose greed, ambition, and ingenuity can be strong enough to find their way around those programs.

“government is bad because it’s a monopoly more than for any other reason. You can think of the world as a free market anarchy where all the land is legitimately owned by 193 landowners that allow you to live on the land under certain conditions.”

Peer-to-peer networks interconnect equally privileged nodes with each other, allowing users to share and transfer data without the need of a centralized administrative entity. Systems using this architecture are resilient against censorship, attacks, and manipulation. Just like the mythological Hydra, there’s no one head that you can cut off to kil

Ethereum uses the Account/Balance model, which keeps track of the total balance, or “state,” of each account. If Bitcoin’s UTXO model is similar to bills and coins, Ethereum’s model is more like a checking account, allowing for fine-grained control over the amount that can be withdrawn, and making more complex programs easier to implement.

To keep the system fully decentralized, the correct outcome needs to be defined by consensus, and that’s where the REP tokens come in. Holders will stake their REP to an outcome, either before or in a brief period after it happens. Those who staked their REP tokens to the correct outcome get their tokens back plus a portion of the fees users paid t

Developers learned the world can’t be crammed into smart contracts, and that smart contracts will only be as smart as the people who wrote them—and those who tried to break them for nefarious or hubristic reasons.

When a transaction is executed, it is broadcast to all the computers in the network for them to update their ledgers. Transactions are bunched together to form a block of data, and once that block runs out of space (1 megabyte right now), computers race to solve a complex mathematical puzzle to verify the transactions, seal the block, and record it

And blockchains didn’t fix everything. They made everything slower, and harder. It made sense to use them only in very specific situations. Smart contracts didn’t make invincible applications. They’re difficult to code, and the use cases weren’t so obvious anymore. Suddenly, after the reality check of the hard fork, Ethereum didn’t feel like a magi